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Hi!
I have been watching Brood War for a long time, and I played it when it first came out, but I was horrible back then, even compared to my also horrible friends. Now, 17-18 years later, I have begun playing it some again. I have played for like 3 weeks now. I'm pretty bad, but not quite as bad as you might imagine. I have a map where you are supposed to micro a probe chased by a zealot the whole game, also macro to hold off an attack, then mass units yourself to attack, and also save a civilian with a shuttle. It's called like Protoss Hotkey Trainer. I can win that 100% of the time, so I'm not super terrible.
I realize that the road to success is in improving macro. But to be able to focus on macro, I want good standard builds that will deal with most kinds of aggression. I realize there are some build order articles here at TL, but there are several reasons why I wanted to make this post. First of all I have some specific questions. Second, which should I choose among the many build orders available? The pros use different builds all the time. Third, some build orders are too micro intensive for me, and I can't use them.
I play Protoss. And let's assume I play only the map Fighting Spirit for now, because that's what I do. And if your build involves a lot of micro early, like gateway expand vs zerg, that is probably too taxing right now. My main problem is not looking at the minimap, money and supply enough. I will invariably get supply blocked and not spend my money. I want to practice that, but it would be helpful if I had faith in my build.
Let's start with the seemingly easiest, in terms of openings, matchup.
PvT
My build is:
Pylon, Gate, Gas, Cyber, Pylon, Goon, Goon Range... after 3 goons or so, expand, then robo with obs, and more gates.
This works well most of the time. However, I have lost to 2 fact pushes. My question is, should I be able to hold off 2 fact pushes with this build? How many goons should I get before expanding? I have heard/seen anywhere from 1-5. I asked someone what I should be doing against 2 fact pushes, and he said that I should be able to hold it off with this build. We tried with me playing T (keep in mind, I have been playing for only 3 weeks, and with only Protoss) and he P, and I crushed him. Then I played vs another guy, and he did a little better. He expanded after only 1 goon I think, so when I came he had 2 gates producing after his expand.
Also, what should I focus on in the mid-game? I usually manage to win if I can prevent the terran from taking more than 3 bases. But if the Terran is good and macros well, he can just push out and take a 4th and there is not much I can do to stop it. I realize it is because I'm bad, so you don't even have to address that. But is there some sort of mid-game attack I can do that should be able to win if I macro well? I mean, keep in mind that I play D and C level opponents on iccup, so something that is just a semi-good timing or something should win if I macro well. It would be useful to have some sort of 10-15 minute attack, because it would also be a benchmark of how well I macroed. Say, maybe 3 base with arbiters, and when he takes his third just recall on top of him and win, or something. On the other hand, arbiters take kind of a long time to get out. I don't know what's supposed to work.
And in late game I don't know what to do. Say I'm on 5 bases, he's on 3 or 4. I don't want to attack into his defensive position, but I'm on 200 supply. What should I do? My APM drops to 20 because I don't know what I should be doing. I'd rather have some sort of attack plan a little earlier, before 200 supply, as mentioned in the previous paragraph.
PvP
Here I'm usually all over the place. I have tried mass zealots, mass goons, HT, DT, fast expand with cannons for detection, reaver drop, reaver defense.
I have come to the conclusion that probably a few early zealots and goons from 1 gate, into robo for reavers, and expanding is the safest/most standard. What, more precisely, should I do? How many zealots, how many goons before robo? When should I expand? Should I go obs after 1 reaver, after 2 reavers? Should I get a forge for detection instead? Are there any major deviations I must do if I scout him doing something weird? Or maybe I need 2 gates in the beginning, but then I probably need to halt production from 2 gates and 1 robo to afford a nexus at some point. Again, I have also seen a lot of people doing zealot rushes to kill probes and do manner pylons, but that is too micro intensive for me right now. I want to be defensive.
PvZ
This is my worst matchup by far. I don't think I have ever won, except when I decided to mass zealots without gas because my opponent seemed really bad. I have like a 3% win ratio.
My build is: Pylon at natural, forge, cannon, nexus, gateway, gas, cyber, stargate, citadel, templar archives, add gates. Build zealots and corsairs constantly, add pylons as needed during this. Then add some goons, HTs, etc.
My main problem is that I don't know when to attack, and if I don't attack, the zerg gets to do what he wants. And if I attack at the wrong time, I get crushed.
Also, should I get a second cannons after nexus, or block with like 2 probes so he can't run by? Should I cut probes anywhere? I saw bisu do it at 13 supply. If I continue with probes, I must add a second pylon at an awkward time, right about when I want to build a nexus, and then another when I want to build a cyber core.
When should I add a robo for detection? When should I take a third base? What should my unit composition look like?
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I think learning the build orders is really important to having good fundamentals, you can really grow from that alone if you just build on that.
What will help you is writing down the build orders (such as on liquipedia) and implementing in a game as close as you can. Obviously you need to adapt if the game calls for it, don't just cookie cutter into your games. Here are some: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/PVTBuilds http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/PVZBuilds http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/PVPBuilds
This helped me a ton back in the day, I remember winning games just from solid build orders, especially in lower ranks since a clean build order execution will result in you having more units than the opponent or w/e.
Sounds to me like you really need to learn how to scout, the importance of scouting, how to read what build your opponent is going, what builds are "correct" counters or adaptations to what your opponent is doing, some timings and then just reacting.
When you scout your opponent, you're not just trying to figure out where they started on the map, but you need to get information on their build order and try to guess what they are trying to do so you can react to it.
In PvZ, you need to see if the zerg is going for a fast pool so you can guard your base from runbys or allins. Or if their drone count is low you can expect generally a more aggressive play style. If they build a lot of drones and not many zerglings, they are going for a more economic game and you have a window to punish the player. Also it's important to see if the player is going hydras or mutalisks or lurkers so you can build the right units to deal with them.
In PvT, you need to get an observer on the terran's chokepoints, his factories, and whether they are going for a fast expansion or for a timing push (although the terran will usually be reacting to your moves). 2 fact push should definitely kill you if you are on 1 gate and you double expand. If you get a fast third, the terran has the option of expanding to keep up with you (which you can react to by expanding, trying to deny his expansion, or harassing), or attack you before your superior economy kicks in along with all your gateways. This match up is a lot about map control, clearing mines, getting surrounds on the terran army (a max terran army is always stronger than a max protoss army in a head-on engagement). You really need to keep track of the terran's factory count at stages of the game, you should generally always have more gateways (and pumping from them) than the terran has factories.
PvP idk much but I used to always go 4gates (the maximum you can have continuously pumping dragoons off 1-base) and if the other player went DTs I would most often lose cuz I delayed my robo too much lol.
Some builds for protoss vs terran and the reasoning behind them (I'm not a protoss player but I will give it a try, others can correct me if I'm wrong), I don't know PvZ or PvP builds as well as PvT. I could be missing stuff.
PvT 1gate into expo --> standard, allows you to adapt into harass or econ style (can go for DTs, Reaver, or into expanding), flexible if the terran goes aggressive, you just add more gateways. 10/15gate --> not used often, but effective on maps where you don't have to shoot up a ramp (Longinus, Aztec, Tau Cross, Jade, Byzantium, etc.) meant to punish greedy terrans. 12 nex --> Economic build, greedy, can be punished if scouted early. Usually better on bigger maps with long distances between players, or 4 player maps, or maps where you know you can defend). 2gate --> more aggressive than 1gate obviously, use a robo with shuttle and you can do a bull dog attack (shuttle with zealots on top of sieged tanks) to punish a terran who has fast expanded. You can adapt and fast expand as well.
I'd say all in all it's about deciding if you want to play standard, greedy, or aggressive, knowing the builds for each and deciding what you want to do based on what you see, the map, your opponent's response, etc.
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It seems as if you have a fundamental problem some beginners tend to have, so don't worry. It'd be a good idea to be slightly more sceptical towards builds at the level you're playing at the moment. While it's true builds are incredibly important, they're not the magical solution to your problems. You try to figure out absolute solutions to relative problems, e.g. you can't simply say "expand after one Zeal and two Goons in PvP".
Taken from your examples: If you face a two factory build and you play what you described after scouting it, you'll bound to lose against a somewhat capable player - make no mistake, most D ranks will punish you. In this scenario, it is your goal to prevent a siege long enough for your additional probes kicking in. It's not only the probes, but also additional Gateways and observers you need. Hence: if you do not magically destroy the first attack right away, you'll find yourself in a micro war which you're probably going to lose. Therefore, when scouting it, you should make sure you can stall the attack long enough and if push comes to shove, be able to trade units equally, while your economy mustn't suffer a lot. This can be done by adding a gateway before expanding and at least setting up an obs tech. If you don't... see above.
Re-watch your lost games from the perspective of your opponent, deactivated vision of yourself and so on. Try to understand what he thought, try to identify his weak spots and pause whenever you feel you found something. Remember these patterns and you'll start to understand the match ups better.
As for stalemates against Terran go: If they turtle in 3+ bases, but do not move out - just expand. Make sure you have Gateways in each corner of the map. Only if you did that, you actually "have" the map. The second he moves out, throw shit at him and constantly reproduce. He will trade better, but lose the economical war over long distance. If he doesn't move out, you can either sac parts of your army and go for carriers and siege him down, or mass hallucinate arbiters and recall. Or just throw shit at his weakest base over and over again. He'll starve eventually.
Not sure if it helps, but I tried adressing this issue a few years back: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/bw-strategy/450579-other-basics
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3% is ok. Don't expect to win, or it's better to say — don't try to win. Choose a build + Show Spoiler +1 gate 2 goons expand PvT, forge FE in PvZ, 3 gate robo obs in PvP I'd say are the most safe and versatile and try to execute it flawlessly in every game. Focus on the build, not your stats, win ratio or w/e. Peace
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A build order is more than what you do in first 4-5 minutes. I'm sure you feel really confident in the first few minutes already. 8 pylon, 10 gas, 11 gateway, 13 core etc. And at some point, you are not sure about what to keep doing, right? You might have heard: * 4 gateways per mining base * keep building probes * don't get supply blocked. * add gates before additional income from a new base kicks in etc. But all of that is relative. BW is about decision making, cutting corners, doing more with less and so on. You can actually have too many probes, and not enough army. That is possible.
The build I am doing now in PvT has timings up to 15 minute mark, including upgrades, expansion times, when to add gates etc. I have taken it from korean protosses. Still have not won a game with it, army control in lategame PvT is hard to me right now. And I go for the long game.
And of course, each build should be adaptive to what your opponent is doing. Which means that no BO you find can be used all the time. I have to say that despite being D+/C- now, there is not a single build I know well.
About PvZ, you have to scout your opponent and recognize what he's doing. If your scouting is bad (like mine), you will play blindly a lot. Zerg could go 5 hatch hydra, or 3 base muta, or 2 base lurker... Lurker slow drop etc.
And if you do a build, you should check your replay and compare your supply, probe count, timings to pro replays of same build. You can use that as a guide
And good job on the hotkey trainer. I tried it in the past, could not keep the probe alive at all. I'll try to find that map as well
Good luck, keep fighting! BW is a hard but really rewarding game
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The fastest way to improve is to watch and analyse replays of your losing games. I would not suggest turning off your own vision like someone suggested becouse you want to know the exact point of the game where you went wrong, so that you remember to adapt correctly the next time you find yourself from similar position. The first time I really tried to climb ranks on iccup, I improved a shitton from analyzing my losing replays alone and went straight to B while I was struggling vs C- ranks before. But before that you should learn starting builds and learn to scout. Scouting is the most important thing in game so you can adapt accordingly.
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On January 05 2017 20:55 GeckoXp wrote: Taken from your examples: If you face a two factory build and you play what you described after scouting it, you'll bound to lose against a somewhat capable player - make no mistake, most D ranks will punish you. In this scenario, it is your goal to prevent a siege long enough for your additional probes kicking in. It's not only the probes, but also additional Gateways and observers you need. Hence: if you do not magically destroy the first attack right away, you'll find yourself in a micro war which you're probably going to lose. Therefore, when scouting it, you should make sure you can stall the attack long enough and if push comes to shove, be able to trade units equally, while your economy mustn't suffer a lot. This can be done by adding a gateway before expanding and at least setting up an obs tech. If you don't... see above.
The problem is that Terran can deny scouting, and when he pushes, I have 4 goons, and he has about 6 marines and 3 tanks. I noticed though, that pretty much every pro protoss does a similar build all the time, so it must be possible to hold it off. Maybe I just need to try to delay him on the way to my base, and be faster with the second gateway after expanding.
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How about posting a replay where you don't find obvious mistakes in your 2fac defense? Should make it much easier to identify your problem here.
You say T can deny scouting, but then you should always be able to play as if he was going strong FD or 2 fac, and then there's definitely a way to hold it off. If instead he's denying the scout, you prepare for 2fac and he's not going 2fac, then again you should be able to react by gaining full map control with your superior production while getting a relatively fast 3rd.
If you do face the 2fac push vs your fast expo, I would also say that you have to work on all the little 'tricks' to delay the push, most notably good hit-and-run micro with your goons all the way to your natural, softening up the marines helps a lot. You can follow this up by doing defensive stuff in your own natural like: building forward pylons to soak damage while you snipe marines/vultures/mines; let your nexus voluntarily take some damage to buy time for more gates to finish; go up to a very specific goon and zealot count to break his push; or even let your nexus die if it has to, and prepare a shuttle-supported counter-attack while re-expanding.
Every early aggression takes very precise reactions in BW, Terrans have their own fill of this if they expand fast: vs proxy gates, zealot pressure, 2gate aggression, DT-rush or Reaver-harrass, or bulldog-attacks with shuttle and zealots... in a way you can be lucky to only face the 2fac... and once you learn to deal with this in most cases, you'll have a very strong PvT-early-game.
Furthermore: on lower levels, even though 2fac is strong, many Terrans can not really handle it. Oftentimes they can either micro or macro behind it, not both. Also: Terran's CC will be relatively late anyway. So if you pull all the tricks to survive, you're at least not behind. On higher levels, you might lose some games to it, but you'll be slightly ahead in macro in other scenarios like normal FDs.
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On January 07 2017 03:58 Piste wrote: The fastest way to improve is to watch and analyse replays of your losing games. I would not suggest turning off your own vision like someone suggested becouse you want to know the exact point of the game where you went wrong, so that you remember to adapt correctly the next time you find yourself from similar position. The first time I really tried to climb ranks on iccup, I improved a shitton from analyzing my losing replays alone and went straight to B while I was struggling vs C- ranks before. But before that you should learn starting builds and learn to scout. Scouting is the most important thing in game so you can adapt accordingly. Could you say more about what specifically to look for when analyzing your losses?
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On January 08 2017 08:00 nbaker wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2017 03:58 Piste wrote: The fastest way to improve is to watch and analyse replays of your losing games. I would not suggest turning off your own vision like someone suggested becouse you want to know the exact point of the game where you went wrong, so that you remember to adapt correctly the next time you find yourself from similar position. The first time I really tried to climb ranks on iccup, I improved a shitton from analyzing my losing replays alone and went straight to B while I was struggling vs C- ranks before. But before that you should learn starting builds and learn to scout. Scouting is the most important thing in game so you can adapt accordingly. Could you say more about what specifically to look for when analyzing your losses? Usually there's an obvious reason for each loss, like dying to a timing attack when you're trying to macro into late game. Look for ways to scout and defend the timing.
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On January 08 2017 08:00 nbaker wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2017 03:58 Piste wrote: The fastest way to improve is to watch and analyse replays of your losing games. I would not suggest turning off your own vision like someone suggested becouse you want to know the exact point of the game where you went wrong, so that you remember to adapt correctly the next time you find yourself from similar position. The first time I really tried to climb ranks on iccup, I improved a shitton from analyzing my losing replays alone and went straight to B while I was struggling vs C- ranks before. But before that you should learn starting builds and learn to scout. Scouting is the most important thing in game so you can adapt accordingly. Could you say more about what specifically to look for when analyzing your losses?
I would suggest you watch your replays several times, because you'll surely miss stuff if you keep your screen at only one place or keep it jumping around.
The first thing you should do is check your macro. You'll be surprised how often you played a "solid macro game" in your impression, and when you look back at the replay, you see that you missed A LOT because you were busy microing your army. When you are in the game, you don't feel that lack of macro because your attention is elsewhere. Is your SCV-production and unit-production running at all times when it should? Do you build everything when you can and not 200-300 minerals too late? Do you start your upgrades on time and follow through with your tech-tree asap or are there bumps? Do you get supply-blocked regularly at certain points in your build?
The next thing to look out for could be micro/engagements, especially those that you considered game-changing, but also earlier engagements that you might have forgotten about. Oftentimes the latter set the tone for the rest of the game. Was your army just standing around idle or out of position for too long? Could you have won smaller or bigger engagements if you microed your units better? Could you have moved your army more favorably before certain engagements, to get a better surround/arc for example? Did you waste special abilities or spells by not using them? Should you have drawn back from certain engagements alltogether? or should you have taken others, where you could have known that you had an advantage?
Last but not least: scouting. You can switch the vision to check when your opponent was doing important stuff and how your scouting-information looked like at the time. Very important is your early-game-scout (sometimes you have to send out one or two additional scouts out if your first one gets killed) and then your overall map-vision throughout the game, most notably in your opponents main and around the empty-bases on the map he could take. Did you see every important thing your opponent was doing when you could have? For example, did you see his fast 3rd base go up? Did you scout his main enough to see his tech and number of production-facilities? Did you have enough spotters around the map to see his unit movement?
As you see, replay analysis is very complex. It's hard to look at all that at once, so maybe you should start with one thing, I'd recommend: macro-mistakes. If you fix those, you'll profit in every game you play, as they're almost always the same (unlike engagements). Next should be the scouting thing imo, as good scouting patterns in each matchup help you in every game you play, too. Then you can move on to specific situations, like that one attack you could not hold in game X, revisit it and see what went wrong (did you not see it coming? did you have units out of positions? could you have build defensive structures in time?).
Try to go one step at a time and not over-analyse one game. Sometimes you learn even little stuff that's very useful later on, like placing a building slightly differently to close a gap in a wall, sending a unit somewhere to spot something at a specific point in time etc.
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